Text to Text | ‘The Real Campus Scourge’ and ‘My College Transition’

Throughout high school, many students work to create the selves they think colleges want. Focusing on résumé-building, they may or may not be doing what truly makes them happy; indeed, they may not even know what makes them happy in the first place. They count on college admission to fulfill all of their dreams.

In his article “The Real Campus Scourge,” Frank Bruni, the author of “Where You’ll Go Is Not Who You’ll Be,” notes that this kind of narrative “frames admission to college as the end of all worry.” For students across the country, college admission has become the fairy-tale equivalent of “happily ever after,” suggesting that the struggle is over; the dragon has been slain.

Yet just as the fairy tale doesn’t show the work of marriage that follows a wedding, this narrative doesn’t acknowledge that leaving home and starting over is hard. Making new friends is hard. Being alone is hard. And social media, with its promises of constant connection and barrages of images that say, “Look at how much fun I’m having,” can make it even worse.

Our Text to Text series pairs often-taught literary, historical, scientific and cultural pieces with articles from The New York Times. In this one, we pair Bruni’s “The Real Campus Scourge” with a YouTube video titled “My College Transition,” created by a Cornell student, Emery Bergmann. In her video, in which Mr. Bruni’s piece makes a guest appearance, Emery offers her take on the lonely reality of college today.

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Background

Starting sophomore year, high school students begin receiving glossy college brochures featuring photos of bucolic natural vistas, smiling groups of students under autumn-tinged trees, and classrooms full of enthusiastic learners. But imagining such scenes begins even earlier, as students start packaging themselves as applicants.

Such polishing concentrates kids’ efforts on a very narrow spectrum of pursuits that play to their strengths and that are mastered with pure discipline, diligence and plotting. It doesn’t necessarily foster or reward creativity. It doesn’t acknowledge the importance of spontaneity, serendipity, setback, resilience and (to use the coinage du jour) grit in life and in eventual success. I think frequently of something that a former admissions director at Pomona said to me, because it’s something that other elite-school faculty members and administrators have also told me: They recruit and admit young men and women who are fantastic on paper but who are in fact very fragile, because they’ve flourished in a very particular way and in a very particular climate, with the illusion of complete control, and they don’t know how to pivot to new circumstances and turn on a dime.

Students find themselves at a loss when thrust into a reality that doesn’t match up with their expectations. They fear failure, and sometimes lack the skills they need to survive and thrive in a new environment.

Social media can further complicate early college experiences. For one, students have been shaped, for better or worse, by growing up with smart technology at their fingertips. Not only are parents a text away, but so are high school friends. Their expectations of college, too, have been shaped by sunny emails from schools during application season and carefully curated Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat stories of fun and friends posted by peers. Many students find themselves connected virtually but feeling alone — and convinced everyone else has it all figured out.

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Key Questions

• How can the buildup to college lead to loneliness during freshman year?

• How does social media both reflect and shape our expectations of reality?

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Activity Sheets

As students read and discuss, they might take notes using one or more of the three graphic organizers (PDFs) we have created for our Text to Text feature:

Across the country, college freshmen are settling into their new lives and grappling with something that doesn’t compete with protests and political correctness for the media’s attention, something that no one prepared them for, something that has nothing to do with being “snowflakes” and everything to do with being human.

They’re lonely.

In a sea of people, they find themselves adrift. The technology that keeps them connected to parents and high school friends only reminds them of their physical separation from just about everyone they know best. That estrangement can be a gateway to binge drinking and other self-destructive behavior. And it’s as likely to derail their ambitions as almost anything else.

Brett Epstein felt it. “I spent my first night in the dorm and it hit me like a pile of bricks: It’s just me here,” Epstein, a 21-year-old senior at the College of Charleston, told me about his start there three years ago. “I was completely freaked out.”

Clara Nguyen felt it, too. “It’s a lot more difficult to make friends than people make it out to be,” Nguyen, a 19-year-old sophomore at U.C.L.A., told me about her experience last year. “I didn’t know how to be someone new while at the same time being who I always was.”

The problem sounds so ordinary, so obvious: People in an unfamiliar location confront dislocation. On their own two legs for the first time, they’re wobbly. Who would expect otherwise?

Well, most of them did, because college isn’t sold to teenagers as just any place or passage. It’s a gaudily painted promise. The time of their lives! The disparity between myth and reality stuns many of them, and various facets of youth today — from social media to a secondary-school narrative that frames admission to college as the end of all worry — worsen the impact.

Harry Rockland-Miller, who just retired as the director for the Center for Counseling and Psychological Health at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me the emblematic story of a freshman he treated:

“He was 18. He came to school and was invited to a party his first weekend, and he didn’t know anybody. So he started to drink. He drank way too much and ended up lying on a bench in his residential hall, feeling very sick. Nobody stopped and said, ‘How are you doing? Are you O.K.?’ And he felt so isolated. When he came in to speak with me the next day, the thing that struck him — what he said — was, ‘There I was, alone, with all these people around.’”

Alone, with all these people around. In a survey of nearly 28,000 students on 51 campuses by the American College Health Association last year, more than 60 percent said that they had “felt very lonely” in the previous 12 months. Nearly 30 percent said that they had felt that way in the previous two weeks.

Victor Schwartz, the medical director of the Jed Foundation, which is one of the nation’s leading advocacy groups for the mental health of teenagers and young adults, said that those findings were consistent with his own observation of college students today. “While they expected that academics and finances would be sources of stress,” he told me, “many students were lonely and thought this was sort of unique to them, because no one talked about it.”

Their peers in fact do something that mine couldn’t back in the 1980s, when I attended college: use Facebook and Instagram to perform pantomimes of uninterrupted fun and unalloyed fabulousness. And these “highly curated selves,” as the U.C.L.A. psychologist Elizabeth Gong-Guy called them, “amplify the fact that you’re sitting in your residence hall alone.”

For Writing or Discussion

1. According to Frank Bruni, what are some of the root causes of loneliness on campus?

2. To echo Emery Bergmann’s words, in what way do phones “suck”? In her view, how do they contribute to loneliness on campus?

3. How are colleges responding to this “epidemic”?

4. How might secondary schools better prepare students for the realities of college?

5. How does Ms. Bergmann’s video offer a correction to other media portrayals of college life? In what way is this useful?

6. What gives Ms. Bergmann hope? Why?

7. What lines in the Op-Ed echo moments in the video? What moments in the video might be illustrations for lines in the Op-Ed? Why?

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Going Further

The Buildup to College

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College counselors at a high school in Queens. Related ArticleCreditNicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

How does the buildup to college lead to the kind of loneliness Mr. Bruni and Ms. Bergmann describe?

Look at a sample of recent college brochures. What expectations do the images promote? Brainstorm a list. Why might these images seem particularly attractive to high school students? What challenges might accompany the freedoms the college advertise? What’s missing from these photos? How do you go about getting an authentic read on a college as part of figuring out where you want to go?

Once you get there, where do you find your people in a partly virtual world where there aren’t necessarily physical places to look? How do you define yourself in a completely new place in the absence of the people and activities that once helped define you?

Talk about these questions in pairs or small groups, then write personal essays — with your name, or posted anonymously — about your own process and questions. You might also work with others to create a list of recommendations for their college guidance office that helps anticipate some of the transition issues they have identified.

Social media gives us the illusion that we are never alone, and yet research suggests that time spent on screens doesn’t make us happy.

In her essay “Happiness Is Other People,” Ruth Whippman notes that today’s teenagers spend less time hanging out with their friends, “replacing real-world interaction with smartphones.” Why go out and make new friends if you can hang out with friends from secondary school virtually?

Consider your social media use. How much time do you spend alone with your phone versus physically hanging out with your friends? What role does your phone play when you are with your friends? Does it augment relationships? Or does it distract from them? Do you agree with Jean M. Twenge’s argument in The Atlantic that smartphones have “destroyed” your generation? Why or why not?

You might then try to answer the big question we pose at the top of this lesson: How does social media both reflect and shape our expectations of reality in general? How do you think that plays out specifically in the context of going to college?

Some commenters on Mr. Bruni’s Op-Ed attacked these students as “snowflakes,” dismissing their loneliness as a normal part of going to a new place.

Several argued that teenagers who have been sheltered by their parents and programmed their whole lives do not have the inner resources necessary to cope with normal parts of growing up and becoming adults.

Talk back to these critics. Are they wrong? How? What might they have right? What might they not fully understand? If you’ve been away from home, what have you learned from homesickness and managing new freedoms? What value lies in the struggle? Have you learned to be more self-reliant? More resilient?

How can parents foster more resilience in their children, better preparing them for the unknowns of the world beyond their homes?

An Issue of Privilege?

Video

What is it like to be the first member of your family to go to college? First-generation college students must learn to deal with the privilege and the challenges.Published OnApril 8, 2015CreditCreditCharlie Mahoney for The New York Times

Ana Barros grew up in a two-family house built by Habitat for Humanity, hard by the boarded-up buildings and vacant lots of Newark. Neither parent attended college, but she was a star student. With a 2200 on her SATs, she expected to fit in at Harvard.

Yet here she was at a lecture for a sociology course called, paradoxically, “Poverty in America,” as a classmate opened her laptop and planned a multicountry spring break trip to Europe. (Ms. Barros can’t afford textbooks; she borrows from the library.) On the sidewalks of Cambridge, students brush past her in their $700 Canada Goose parkas and $1,000 Moncler puffer jackets. (Ms. Barros saved up for two years for good boots.) On an elite campus, income inequality can be in your face.

A professor once described how hardships become inscribed on one’s body, and Ms. Barros thought of her father, a janitor at a home for troubled boys, and the wrinkles carved in his face from worrying about money and her mother’s health. Majoring in sociology, she says, “has made me hyperaware of class differences here.”

Weary of trying to pass as middle class, Ms. Barros decided to “come out,” borrowing the phrase from the gay community. She joined and now leads the two-year-old Harvard College First Generation Student Union, which has 300 on its email list. “This is a movement,” she said. “We are not ashamed of taking on this identity.”

What can colleges learn about how to support all students during their college transitions by borrowing ideas from programs created for these and other marginalized groups?